At Raven Rock, Vice President Cheney began laying plans for war.
Also on the morning of September 11, 2001, shortly before 9:40 a.m., Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was sitting in his office on the third floor of the Pentagon listening to a prescheduled briefing by the CIA. Rumsfeld took notes on a small, round wooden table once used by General William Tecumseh Sherman, famous for his scorched earth and total war policies, and for saying, “War is hell.” Earlier that same morning, terrorists had hijacked four airplanes and had, by now, flown two of them into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Outside the door of the office of the secretary of defense, a Pentagon police officer named Aubrey Davis was standing guard.
“There was an incredibly loud ‘boom,’” Davis later told British journalist Andrew Cockburn. Terrorists had just crashed an American Airlines commercial jet into the Pentagon. Secretary Rumsfeld emerged from his office and asked Davis what was going on. Davis, relaying information that was coming over his portable radio, told the secretary of defense that he was getting reports that an airplane had hit the Pentagon. Rumsfeld listened, then hurried down the corridor. Davis followed after him. The smell of smoke filled the air. People were running down the hallways, yelling and screaming. “They’re bombing the building, they’re bombing the building!” someone hollered. After several minutes of walking, Rumsfeld, Davis, and others who had joined the group arrived at what looked like a wall of fire.
“There were flames, and bits of metal all around,” Davis recalled. A woman was lying on the ground right in front of him, her legs horribly burned. “The Secretary picked up one of the pieces of metal,” Davis remembered. “I was telling him that he shouldn’t be interfering with a crime scene when he looked at the inscription on it and [it read], ‘American Airlines.’” Amid the chaos and smoke, there were shouts and cries for help. Someone passed by with an injured person laid out on a gurney. Secretary Rumsfeld helped push the gurney outside.
By 10:00 a.m. Rumsfeld was back inside the Pentagon. After calling the president from his office in the E-Ring, he was moved to a secure location elsewhere in the building, likely underground. From there, Rumsfeld spoke with Vice President Cheney, who was still in the bunker beneath the White House. At 12:05 p.m. Rumsfeld received a call from CIA director George Tenet, who reported that the National Security Agency had just intercepted a call between one of Osama bin Laden’s deputies and a person in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia discussing the “good news,” a clear reference to the terrorist strikes. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were responsible for the attacks, the CIA director told the secretary of defense.
A little after 2:00 p.m. Rumsfeld gathered a core group of military advisors and Pentagon staff and began discussing what steps he wanted taken next. The people in the room included General Richard Myers, acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for intelligence; Victoria Clarke, a Pentagon spokeswoman; and a Pentagon lawyer. Cambone and Clarke took notes with pen and paper. During the meeting, Rumsfeld discussed the possibility of going after Saddam Hussein and Iraq as a response to that morning’s terrorist attack. The notes of the undersecretary for intelligence, later reviewed by the 9/11 Commission, revealed that Rumsfeld asked for “Best info fast… judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time—not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].” Rumsfeld asked the lawyer in the room to discuss with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz “connection with UBL [Usama bin Laden]” and Iraq.
Two days later, on September 13, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice gathered for dinner at Holly Lodge, Camp David, which is located just a few miles from the Site R underground command center. The topic discussed, according to matching accounts in three of the four advisors’ memoirs, was how America would respond to the 9/11 attacks.
“We all knew the outcome would be a declaration of war against the Taliban,” Rice wrote. “But the discussion was useful in teasing out the questions the President would need to address.”
“We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy,” Cheney wrote in his memoir. “We were not simply going to go after individual cells of terrorists responsible for 9/11. We were going to bring down their networks and go after the organizations, nations, and people who lent them support.”
“I argued that our strategy should be to put them on the defensive,” wrote Rumsfeld. “The emphasis on a global campaign was important, I believed.” Preemption was the new way forward. Thwarting the enemy before he made his next move.
On September 16, CIA director George Tenet sent out a memo to CIA staff. In the “Subject” line he wrote, “We’re at war.” Tenet told his CIA staff that in order to successfully “wage a worldwide war against al-Qa’ida and other terrorist organizations… [t]here must be absolute and full sharing of information, ideas, and capabilities.” For George Tenet, information was the way to win this war.
At the CDC in Atlanta, David Bray and his colleagues continued to work around the clock, keeping channels open between the CDC and health professionals in all fifty states. Each day that passed without receiving health-related information that might suggest a bioterrorism event was under way meant another day of relief. “On October first we were told to stand down,” Bray recalls. On October 3, he flew to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. There, inside the George H. W. Bush Center for Intelligence, Bray gave the Interagency Intelligence Committee on Terrorism a briefing about what the CDC’s Laboratory Response Network would do in the event of a bioterrorism attack. It was a seminal moment for Bray, only twenty-four years old and with considerable responsibility, and there was something he learned at CIA headquarters that still amazed him fourteen years later.
“The agency didn’t know we existed,” says Bray. He was the chief technology officer for the CDC team that would handle a biological weapons event were it to happen, and yet, according to Bray, no one in the audience at CIA headquarters seemed to know anything about it. For Bray, it was a revelatory moment.
“We were created by public law, Presidential Decision Directive Thirty-nine,” Bray explains. “But they [the CIA] did not have that information.” If knowledge is the most strategically significant resource of an organization, as David Bray believes and as George Tenet stated in his “We’re at war” memo, the U.S. bioterrorism defense community had a very long way to go. For Bray, bridging the gap between having good information and effectively disseminating good information would become a professional crusade. He would continue this work over the next decade as an information specialist for DARPA in Afghanistan, for James Clapper in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, D.C., and as the chief information officer for the Federal Communications Commission, starting in 2013. The lessons learned in the hyper-turbulent environment would shape his career.
The day after David Bray briefed an auditorium full of intelligence officials at CIA headquarters in Langley, he traveled back to the CDC’s Atlanta offices, where he learned about a serious new development. Bray was told that a sixty-three-year-old Florida man had been hospitalized in Boca Raton with inhalation anthrax.
“You’re joking,” Bray remembers saying. The man was Bob Stevens, and he was a photo editor with American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer. Twenty-four hours later, Bob Stevens was dead.
Things very quickly went from bad to worse. The FBI was now involved. On October 12, an NBC employee in New York City tested positive for anthrax. On October 15, Senate majority leader Tom Daschle told reporters that anthrax had been found in his Senate office. The Hart Senate Office Building was evacuated and put under quarantine. Hundreds of people lined up for anthrax tests. The Capitol itself was swept clear of vehicles and nonessential visitors. A bunker mentality took hold. “A war of nerves is being fought in Washington,” a senior White House official told the New York Times,
“and I fear we’re not doing as well as we might be.”
Over the next few days, more individuals tested positive for anthrax poisoning after letters containing the substance were mailed to ABC, CBS, and the U.S. State Department. People were beginning to die. When the 1,271,030-square-foot Hart Building needed to be decontaminated, DARPA was asked to provide science advisors to help with the enormous undertaking. A team of DARPA scientists reviewed decontamination technologies and delivered “quick turn-around testing on three separate candidates to determine efficacy.” The test that proved most effective happened to be the “chlorine dioxide approach.” This approach was based on technology that DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office director, Michael Goldblatt, together with scientist Alvin Chow, had created for self-sterilizing packages in the wake of the E. coli Jack in the Box scandal. “We’d created it in a solid-state form to be triggered by light or humidity,” Goldblatt explains. “My interpretation was a human scale; [DARPA’s] solution was a huge scale.” For this, says Goldblatt, he feels “a little bit of pride.”
Three days after Senator Daschle told reporters that anthrax had been found in his office, Vice President Cheney paid a visit to ground zero, his first visit to the World Trade Center site since the 9/11 attacks. It was a little after 1:00 p.m. on October 18, 2001, when Cheney boarded Air Force Two and headed to New York City. He had been airborne for just a short time when his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, received a telephone call.
“There had been an initial positive test result indicating a botulinum toxin attack on the White House,” Cheney revealed in his memoir. “If the result was confirmed, it could mean the president and I, members of the White House staff, and probably scores of others who had simply been in the vicinity had been exposed to one of the most lethal substances known to man.” Botulinum toxin was a deadly neurotoxin for which there was no reliable antidote or cure. It kills by attacking the central nervous system and causing death by paralysis.
The positive hits had come from the BASIS sensor system that had been installed throughout the White House complex shortly after the Dark Winter bioterrorism attack war game. Livermore and Los Alamos had promoted the BASIS system as being able to deliver “a virtually zero rate of false-positive detection.” Cheney also knew that “a single gram of botulinum toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled, can kill a million people.” He needed to call the president but decided to have Scooter Libby get a second set of test results first.
In the interim, the vice president stuck to his schedule. He met with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki for a briefing on New York City affairs. He toured ground zero. He shook hands with recovery workers who were sorting through rubble at the crash site. When he returned to his hotel room at the Waldorf Astoria later that afternoon, he discovered Libby waiting for him there, with very bad news. “He told me there had been two positive hits for botulinum toxin on one of the White House sensors,” wrote Cheney. More tests were being run and results would be available at noon the following day. It was time to call the president.
Cheney was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner that evening in the Waldorf Astoria ballroom. Wearing white tie and tails, he sat down in front of a secure video screen in his hotel room and called President Bush, who was attending a summit in Shanghai. Accompanying the president were Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. All three had been in the White House complex; all three could have been exposed to botulinum toxin.
“Mr. President,” Vice President Cheney said, “the White House biological detectors have registered the presence of botulinum toxin, and there is no reliable antidote. We and many others may well have been exposed,” Cheney recalled telling the president.
President Bush turned to Condoleezza Rice, who was standing beside him in Shanghai. In her memoir, Rice recalls hearing the president say, “Go call Hadley and find out what the hell is going on.” Stephen Hadley was the president’s deputy national security advisor. Hadley told Rice that lab mice were now being tested.
“Let’s put it this way,” said Hadley, who could also have been exposed. “If the mice are feet down tomorrow, we are fine. If they’re feet up, we’re toast.”
In New York City, Vice President Cheney headed downstairs. During his speech, he talked about the bravery, generosity, and grace shown to him by average Americans digging through the rubble at ground zero that day. “I promised to deliver justice to the people responsible,” Cheney said. He talked about the dilemma that America would now face with this new enemy, the terrorist. “We are dealing here with evil people who dwell in the shadows, planning unimaginable violence and destruction,” he said. The banquet hall at the Waldorf Astoria erupted into resounding applause.
The following day, the results of the BASIS sensor system were returned. The $50 million system had delivered a false positive. There had been no biological weapons attack. No terror strike on the White House. If knowledge is the most strategically significant resource in a hyper-turbulent environment, scientists at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories had failed. Still, in his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush announced he was “deploying the nation’s first early warning network of sensors to detect biological attack.” BASIS sensors would now be set up in more than thirty cities around the country, at an initial cost of roughly $30 million, with another $1 million per city, per year, estimated in maintenance costs. Between 2003 and 2008, newspapers reported more than fifty false alarms from BASIS sensors in public spaces. The full details of BASIS, including its locations, operational costs, and precise number of false positives, as well as emergency response efforts, if any, to those false positives, remain classified.
But in Shanghai, in October 2001, Condoleezza Rice happily received the good news.
“Feet down, not up,” she told President Bush. “The President smiled,” she wrote in her memoirs. “I’m sure the Chinese thought it was some kind of coded message.”
The president, vice president, secretary of state, national security advisor, and others had dodged a bullet. A photo editor, two postal workers, a female hospital employee, and a ninety-four-year-old woman from Connecticut were dead from anthrax. As of 2014, the mystery of who killed them has yet to be definitively solved.
At the end of October, ABC News reported that the anthrax mailed to Senator Daschle’s office could be tied to the Iraqi bioweapons program through an additive called bentonite. The White House denied the link. A few nights later, ABC News reported that the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, “had met at least once with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.” The report kicked off a firestorm of related news articles, including some that confirmed the story of the Iraq link, some that discredited the story, and some that blamed the CIA for engaging in a disinformation campaign.
Congress asked DARPA director Anthony Tether to brief the House Armed Services Committee on efforts currently being undertaken by DARPA with regard to its Biological Warfare Defense Program. Tony Tether had been DARPA director for only three months when the airplanes hit the buildings, but he had decades of experience in the Department of Defense and the CIA. Tether had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a long career at the Pentagon and in the intelligence world. Since 1978 he had been working in both intelligence and defense, serving as the director of the national intelligence office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1978 to 1982, and from 1982 to 1986 as the director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, the agency’s liaison to the CIA. The specifics of his job remain classified, but as an indication of his significance, at the end of his tenure in 1986, Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey honored him with the National Intelligence Medal, while his superior at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, presented him with the Department of Defense Civilian Meritorious Service Medal.
In information submitted to Congress, Tether categorized biological we
apons defense according to what DARPA considered to be the five stages of a biological weapons attack, in chronological order. “Prior to a BW attack” involved the development of vaccines. “During an attack” focused on cutting-edge sensor and biosurveillance technologies. “In the minutes and hours after an attack” included developing immediate ways to protect people. “In the hours and days after an attack” involved more efficient ways to get information out to first responders and better management of medical systems. “In the days and perhaps years after an attack” focused on decontamination technology, Tether said.
In February 2002, just four months after the first U.S. murder by anthrax, Congress approved a $358 million budget for biological warfare defense for the next year, nearly three times what it had been the year before the 9/11 terror attacks. That same month, George Mason University announced it would be building a Center for Biodefense “to address issues related to biological terrorism and the proliferation of biological weapons.” A press release stated, “Kenneth Alibek, former first deputy chief of the civilian branch of the Soviet Union’s Offensive Biological Weapons Program, and Charles Bailey, former commander for Research at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,” would serve as executive administrators of the center. “Alibek was now in charge of finding solutions to problems he helped create,” says Michael Goldblatt, who oversaw some of Alibek’s work for DARPA.